When Dimple Met Rishi – Sandhya Menon

“Hello future wife,” he said, his voice bubbling with glee. “I can’t wait to get started on the rest of our lives.”

Blurb: “Dimple Shah has it all figured out. With graduation behind her, she’s more than ready for a break from her family, from Mamma’s inexplicable obsession with her finding the “Ideal Indian Husband.” Ugh. Dimple knows they must respect her principles on some level, though. If they truly believed she needed a husband right now, they wouldn’t have paid for her to attend a summer program for aspiring web developers…right?”

When Dimple Met Rishi is another one of those books that I wasn’t really interested in but had a massive buzz around it. So I decided to give it a go.

The story follows a girl called Dimple who has bagged herself a place at Stanford University and wants to spend her summer at Insomnia Con- a coding camp. When her parents do a U-turn and pay the fees so that she can go, Dimple finally feels like they are giving her more freedom and not so focused on her finding the “perfect Indian husband.” Little does she know that her parents have been talking to another family and a boy called Rishi is being sent to the same camp in the hopes of securing a relationship.

As I seem to have a big aversion to Young Adult Contemporary – yet still find myself reaching for it occasionally – I did not really expect much from this book apart from a light-hearted summer romance read. In some ways I was pleasantly surprised. Dimple is a stand out character. While she does fall to some “not like other girls” tropes, she is a very abrasive character at times compared to Rishi who is softer and the typical “boy that gets everything wrong no matter how hard he tries.” I’ve seen a lot of controversy online about Dimple throwing her iced coffee on someone and how it promotes that sort of behaviour etc but when you look at the context of the scene, it makes sense that she did that and was very fitting with the type of character she is.

I flew through the first half of the book and loved the use of duo-narrative to get both sides of the story as that balance between the characters was needed. However, past the halfway point it felt like the plot was struggling and that things were added to try and get the story to the final part. I was so invested but then found myself taking longer breaks between reading and when I did read it I was flicking through a couple of pages at best. It just seemed like the first half had had more focus on it than the latter half. When I finished the book I didn’t feel fulfilled. I felt let down a little.

I suppose it’s my own fault for delving into a book with so much hype expecting high things but it’s not something I’ve thought about since I put it down.